Saturday, May 12, 2007

As you can see the UI VFS plugin is playing nice with the recently updated UTPackage plugin. If you read the latest forum post it has detailed instructions on how to load your Lineage II SkeletalMesh right out of the UKX more or less. I'm going to be merging the VFS plugin into Freyja, so things like this can be a two step process for you guys. Open the pak and browse to the SkeletalMesh and double click. Oh, I guess that's three steps. Many other minor fixes and features are in as well. Expect your packages this Sunday as usual with the new regular release schedule. ;)

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

As the animator moves along it's time to start adding pretty, pretty UI elements. I wrote some weak bisymmetry to the skeletal system today. This helps me crank out better looking stick men as you can see. Not bad for an animator that is still prealpha. Finally, the idea of pulling out all the features and reimplementing them is paying off big time. IK is still on hold pending the bug found in 0.9.5.8. The 0.9.5.9 release should have a ton of bug fixes and other features you'll enjoy.

I'm still hitting a lot of annoying bugs in the UI controls, so by the time alpha is out you can go back to having a trusty file I/O and lots of pretty autogenerated plugin preferences. Yes, I did cheat and reuse a mesh. I'll toss up some pics of the skeleton, skinning, etc so you can tell me if my programmer art is getting better. ;)

No need to ask... the Lineage II UI plugin will have pak support for 0.9.5.9 release. The skeleton you see above may be included with this plugin. It's possible to dynamically skin PC models, but I think it would be better to spend that time on RE. Depending on time I may peek at L2/UE2 skeletal serialized dumps. If it looks like a 'mini feature' you will get it, since this is the #1 requested feature of this project as of now. Several plugins will likely continue being updated from the legacy API this week too. You'll notice in the screenshot I got around to updating the SMD support for skinning today.

Please remember this project isn't meant to unseat blender or anything of that nature. It's an old hobby project I dusted off to remake into something more akin to milkshape. ;)

Monday, May 7, 2007

Many, many bug fixes and minor features in this release. FK is fully working again aside from usability issues. It's about time to start writing some user documentation, but that will wait for alpha's stable underpinnings. IK did not get released, and may be put on hold for a while. I found some very annoying bugs in the interface / event system caused, which I fixed -- yet more remain. Mostly it's due to buggy gtk+ file dialogs, so I'm going to be reworking those for 0.9.5.9.This mostly means when you save it'll do annoying things like save twice depending on how you trigger the file dialog action. I'm tempted to write my own file dialog widgets again after this... Here's an ugly screen displaying some wonderus programmer art of me throwing a character 'model' out the building. Yeah, when I do scratch tests some real 'art' is made in the 10mins it takes to make a new skeleton / mesh / skin / animate. =/

Windows and Linux binaries will be out either tonight or tomorrow as the file server allows. If you're scratching your head over all the new texture generators... you might care to know I'm going to restore the auto UV mapping to it's former glory for the next release too. If you find any bugs as always please file them. Your bug reports save the lives of countless stick men!

Friday, May 4, 2007

No, 0.9.5.8 isn't out yet. I did however release an UI plugin to load UE2 'RAW' SkeletalMeshes from Lineage II and other games. As of right now it's just the reverse engineering util, which guesses the serialized format on a per chunk data basis. This means only meshes working with -a option will work for now. This is basically a 5min feature for a fourm 'gift' -- but it does autogenerate pretty normals, etc for you. I'm planning to release improved utpak browsing support + RAW with the 0.9.5.8 release. Most likely all contained in the plugin. I'll also toss you a screenshot for being so nice. Try to guess what the model is from.

I should add that the reason for the delay was the network dropped for a while, so I had to wait for that and until I was finished watching the new Naruto Shippuuden. Go Team Maito Gai!

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Well, now the FK issues are 'fixed' it's time to enforce the API changes all over the codebase and in plugins. As you can see I got time to fix the 1% and fix the SMD plugin's API use. Now to work on usability and UI fixes. Refactoring the UI, which still has leftovers from when this project was a software renderer, is going to be a major part of the move to 0.9.6 beta. I'll post another update if I get IK in svn, or if the legacy 'bones' are removed.

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Hey hey kids. I think it's kind of crazy that I'm coding at 0300-0430 tonight, but the results are pretty nice. I got a ton of fixes and API updates in just after a few hours from last release.

FK and skinning are about 99% done

New dialog button icons

PSK plugin update ( it using legacy API )

Tons more skeletal visualization options

A little optimization here and there

Fixed a bug in bone pick ray from 0.9.5.7

I plan to wrap up the FK fixes tomarrow, so I can get working on IK and physics tests. I'll keep updating plugins as I have extra time to the new APIs. It's looking better everyday for features needed for NOD support, but not there yet. Here's a pic of the FK fixes so far for your amusement. I'll continue to work on UI issues/features as I come to them as well. The generated UI for plugin import/export options might come in this week too, but it all depends on how much free time I get.